by Isis Grimalkin
I stood straight as a soldier between the dry wall apartments like dirt between two concrete sidewalk sections. The rain gutter above my head rattled with the thunder of the clouds like a thousand engines in the distance. I could see the stench of the trash which boiled in the summertime heat beneath its aluminum wastebasket lids. The night sky, which had watched me all those months with its countless space station eyes, was now sleeping in its clouded haze. The electric generator warmth of the August rain enveloped me in its softness like the red velvet dress of the woman whose crackling cigarette voice sang in the pub down the road. I could taste the melody on her lips as a raindrop and a shiver ran down the canyon of her spine.
The sidewalk was alive with worms, who writhed in ecstatic pleasure, intoxicated by drop after dulcet drop of rain. Dodging them, my steps tripled as I thought of the remaining three miles to the old bomb shelter. I could see Mikhail waiting up for me in the dark, sitting on the second to last grated metal stair, the soft smoky glow from the mouth of the tobacco pipe he carved with his jackknife would be the only light in the room. Mikhail hated to waste candles.
The halogen OPEN sign glowed orange like candlelight in the window of the pub. The woman’s cigarette voice faltered in its plastic grace notes as the shadow of her laughter danced in the threshold of the door. I inhaled a breath of saccharine dandelion wine odor, toxic as opium, which burned its initials into the tip of my tongue. I hop-scotched over the legs of a tangled drunk who lay in his vomit outside the bar. From a hand inside that world of numb flesh, a half-empty bottle of grain alcohol slipped, rolled down the wet sidewalk, and shattered like hope in the road.
Fiberglass transistors from an old radio shattered in the silence of the bomb shelter. With his bare heel, Mikhail kicked in the screen of a television, who drank electricity from a car battery, its glass shards now chiming on the cold sheet metal floor like church bells. “The sewage pipes of television sets recycle dead goldfish and shit into our heads,” he muttered as a last image of a news reporter flickered and faded in the cracked screen. Static. Fade to black.
The midnight sky was black as language. Storm clouds like great obsidian stallions still thundered on the still wind. I was beyond the city limits; one mile until I would arrive at the bomb shelter. The grass like feather-soft shag carpet on which I tread grew peacefully over virgin earth. Man had yet to rape this wilderness with his bulldozers and cranes. The mechanical disease called humanity with its syphilitic cities, anemic electricity, and rheumatic roads. As the warm August rain melted the gray clothes to my goosebumped skin, I so violently wished for a cure. Are the whispers of pollen in the air enough to cure ambition? Is the fracture of dead leaves underfoot enough to outsing the buzz of powerlines? I give them twenty years until their progress is a heaping pile of green rust.
Mikhail stoically washed the blood from his mangled feet in a rusty rainwater-filled hubcap. The surface of the translucent red water painted a better picture of his weathered face than the hubcap’s faded chipped chrome. He picked out the glass with his dirty fingernails and stitched the wounds shut with a dull sewing needle and a piece of wintergreen floss. I remember him singing as a last crimson drop fell to the water and bloomed beneath the surface like a brilliant red amaryllis.
I grew many flowers, all red, outside the abandoned boarded-up-window building which held the trapdoor to our home. Roses, hibiscus, geraniums, peonies: they disgusted him. He said I was careless. Someone would see the flowers. Someone would find us. I knelt to pick a red red chrysanthemum, and tucked it into a tangle of my dripping dishwater brown hair. I entered the building through a hole in the dry wall, which wheezed with asthma.
It was his horrid rasping cough which had woken me in the early twilight hours of that evening. He was sick. So sick. Blind men could read his ribs and vertebrae like braille. I had left the shelter to find old bread, an orange rind, stale crackers, anything to keep his stomach from devouring him. His belly had screamed louder than lightning when I had last gone over those stairs.
The steps pricked at my bare feet as I sank down the staircase. At the end, the hatch of the bomb shelter door groaned in agony as I lifted it from its rest. I let a candle. The door swung open.
The bomb shelter was silent as words. Mikhail lay dead on his side, his skin grayer, colder than the ironware floor beneath him.
